White Rage: The Unspoken Truth Of Our Racial Divide

Author: Carol Anderson

Bllomsbury, New York, 2016, pp. 256

White Rage, by Professor of African American Studies Carol Anderson, centres on a discussion on race, more specifically on the foregrounding of whiteness and the continuing threat that structural racism poses to US democratic aspirations. She provides an historical account of landmark moments in US history, namely the end of the Civil War and the Reconstruction; the reaction to the Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education in 1954; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965; the disenfranchisement of Black communities in the aftermath of Reagan’s War on Drugs; and the mass protests in Ferguson, Missouri, triggered by the shooting of Mike Brown in 2014. Through her analysis, Anderson argues that white rage erupts as a backlash at a moment of Black progress and therefore needs to be placed at the centre of US’s national history. In this light, White Rage is an attempt to illustrate how whiteness is positioned at the core of state power, and how it permits the reinforcement of a system that systematically disadvantages African Americans.